Open call for papers: Special Feature on understanding climate change response in the age of genomics

Anthropogenic climate change is rapidly transforming environments and poses a major threat to species and ecosystems worldwide. Understanding how animal populations respond to these changing environments is crucial for developing conservation and mitigation strategies as global temperatures continue to rise. It is now becoming increasingly feasible to generate data at genome and population-wide scales for many species, including those at the greatest risk from the effects of climate change. Recent genomics-based studies have begun to shed light on the mechanisms by which animal populations respond to climate change and offer methods to predict how populations will respond in the future.

The motivation for this Special Feature is to highlight these emerging genomics approaches and their applications across a diverse range of animal systems. Specifically, contributing papers will be selected that focus on understanding:

  1. range shifts
  2. phenotypic plasticity
  3. local adaptation of animal populations in response to changing environments from a genomics perspective

It is our intent that this collection of papers will serve as a set of guidelines and best practices for researchers using genomics to understand climate change response going forward. Papers will cover new genomic/bioinformatic methods with applications to non-model animal species, genetic approaches to understand population-level responses, and efforts to connect these new understandings with their ecological implications.

Contributions submitted via this open call will be considered for publication in a Special Feature planned for summer 2021. Manuscripts should be submitted in the usual way through the Journal of Animal Ecology website, clearly stating in the cover letter accompanying the submission that you wish to be considered for publication as part of this Special Feature. Acceptable paper types include:

  • Research Articles
  • Reviews
  • Long-term Studies in Animal Ecology
  • Concepts in Animal Ecology
  • ‘How-to…’ articles

Pre-submission inquiries are suggested for non-research paper types. Inquiries and other questions should be directed to: admin@journalofanimalecology.org.

Guest Edited by Lesley Lancaster, Zachary Fuller and Maren Wellenreuther

The deadline for submission is: Friday 4 December 2020

Deadline extended to Thursday 4 March

Submit here

Open Call for Papers: Joint Special Feature on ecological resilience

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Resilience has emerged as a key concept in ecology and conservation biology to understand and predict ecosystem responses to global change. In its broadest and original sense, resilience describes the ability of an ecosystem to resist, and recover from, a disturbance. However, the application of such a concept in different sub-disciplines of ecology and in different study systems has resulted in a wide disparity of definitions and ways of quantifying ecological resilience. To provide an overview of how ecologists define, quantify, compare and predict resilience across different study systems, Journal of Ecology and Journal of Animal Ecology are pleased to launch an open call for manuscripts for a joint Special Feature on ecological resilience.

This Special Feature will integrate a diverse set of resilience studies using novel approaches, across different ecological sub-disciplines, numerous study systems, multiple levels of ecological organisation (e.g. ecological networks), and diverse taxa. An eagerness to break taxonomic frontiers within resilience research and integrate across ecological sub-disciplines motivates this joint Special Feature. We welcome submissions which either provide conceptual advances towards a unified understanding of resilience or provide novel ways of defining, estimating and discriminating resilience/resistance/stability in natural systems. The current Special Feature welcomes a diverse range of applications (e.g. responses to pathogens and invasions), taxa (e.g. algae, fungi, plants, animals, and/or microbes), and scales of biological organisation (e.g. ecophysiology, population ecology, community and ecosystem ecology).

Manuscripts should be submitted in the usual way through the Journal of Animal Ecology or Journal of Ecology websites. Submissions should clearly state in the cover letter accompanying the submission that you wish the manuscript to be considered for publication as part of this Special Feature. Pre-submission enquiries are not necessary, but any questions can be directed to: admin@journalofanimalecology.org or admin@journalofecology.org

Guest Edited by Pol Capdevila Iain Stott and Roberto Salguero-Gomez

The deadline for submission is: Friday 24 July

Deadline EXTENDED TO Friday 11 September

Submit here

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Photo by Ignacio Juarez/Penguin Watch

 

Video: Animal host–microbe interactions special feature open call – find out more

There is only one month to go before the open call for papers for the special feature on animal host-microbe interactions closes. In this video Executive Editor Ken Wilson chats about what types of papers he is looking for and why he believes this topic is going to be a growth area in the future.

Continue reading

Animal host–microbe interactions Special Feature Open call – Only 2 months to go!

There armicrobal-large-web-ade only 2 months left to submit your paper to the Journal of Animal Ecology Special Feature on animal host–microbe interactions. Through this open call, launched by Executive Editor Ken Wilson in June, we aim to open up the process of publishing Special Features by inviting potential authors from emerging fields to contribute. We welcome papers that take differing, or even contrary, viewpoints as we hope to publish a broad spectrum of ideas on animal host–microbe interactions. The Journal has a long history of publishing papers on parasite and disease ecology, as far back as the first issue of the journal in 1932 with a paper by A.D. Middleton on “Syphilis as a disease of wild rabbits and hares” and most recently on the blog we have an excellent post by Associate Editor Andy Fenton on “The role of ecology in managing vector-borne diseases: Zika and beyond”. Continue reading